Art & Creativity Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal is doing what he did best: turning literary etiquette into a political warning shot. The target isn’t just sloppy reviewing; it’s a culture drifting toward epistemic free-for-all, where confidence substitutes for evidence and “I feel” gets dressed up as “it is.” His phrasing is surgical. “Loose putting down” makes the offense sound casual, almost lazy, as if critics are tossing off judgments the way people toss cigarette butts. That looseness is the point: it signals not malice but habit, a popular mode.

The sentence pivots on a neat inversion. Opinions masquerade as facts; facts get demoted to opinions. Vidal isn’t claiming reviewers are wrong so much as insisting they’ve abandoned the contract that makes criticism legible: the separation between what can be checked and what can be argued. Once that boundary blurs, every claim becomes un-falsifiable, and the reviewer’s authority becomes purely performative - a tone, a stance, a brand.

Context matters. Vidal came up in a mid-century literary world where reputations were made and unmade in magazines, and where ideological battles often hid inside aesthetic ones. He watched critics treat art as a proxy war for social rank, politics, and personal grievance. This line reads like a pre-internet diagnosis of the internet: the review as hot take, the fact as “just your perspective.” Vidal’s real complaint is moral. If facts are optional, then accountability is optional, too - and the critic becomes not a guide but a small-time demagogue with a book column.